How does your experience of a being father fit into this?
I guess that was part of the evolution of what this book became. I felt very connected to the father who was shaping him through this. We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing. Sometimes I feel like I’m father of the year, other times I’m like, “How do you do that?” You know, to your kid, how do you say that?
If Billy Lombardo publicly read a Gossip Girls novel aloud, you would likely cry. His tone, his delivery, is like having the most eloquent, literary, soothingly matter-of-fact bedtime story read to you. He makes me feel fortunate that I live in the Chicagoland area, where he has resided his entire life. The first time I heard Lombardo read, I was with my ma in the back of a crowded room. I had no clue who this clean-cut man in a white shirt and black tie was; I had come to hear someone else. My ma and I almost left before he began to read, but as he prepared himself, his kind, content, comforting demeanor compelled me to stay. He then proceeded to read such a ridiculously beautiful story, I looked at my ma, like, “Who the hell is this guy?”
Afterwards, I discovered he had published one book, but it was difficult to find. Wanting more, I went to every reading event where he was to perform. I became one of his many fans. If you are a Springsteen fan and you go to a show, you might hope he plays “Thunder Road”. If you are a Lombardo fan and you go to a reading, you might hope he reads “How I Knew You Were Mad at Me”. The first time I heard him read that story, I was at the Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago with a girl. I didn’t mean to cry in front of her—would have preferred not to—but Billy’s passion caused little tears to throb in my eyes and throat, and broke my heart. I was a fan for life.
Lombardo started as a performance poet at the Green Mill in Chicago, where the famed poetry slam movement began in 1987. Honing his power of expression, his pieces were soon published in StoryQuarterly, Cicada, Other Voices, The Forest Park Post, and the Chicago Sun-Times. In 2005, his first official story collection, the award-winning The Logic of a Rose, was released. A teacher at Chicago’s Latin School, he started Polyphony H.S., the first national student-run literary magazine solely devoted to publishing high-school students. Last summer, his novel-in-stories How to Hold a Woman was published by OV Books, quickly garnering critical acclaim. The poetry and short prose collection Meanwhile, Roxy Mourns came out shortly afterwards. His first novel, The Man With Two Arms, a story about a father’s maniacal quest to raise his son as a completely ambidextrous pitcher, was released by Overlook Press this month.
I spoke with Billy in the Latin School’s teachers’ lounge where, having only seen him at various literary events, he looked different to me, wearing his teaching clothes. I was happy for the students he joked with in the halls as we passed them. He reminded me of my favorite high school teacher, the one who impacted me the most.
- Brandon Will
I read that you never played baseball as a child. You didn’t get into the game until you were an adult? Is this a fact you want to suppress with your new book coming out?
(laughter) No, I don’t mind. I played softball growing up. Obviously, it’s similar, but my introduction to the deeper level of the game was through my sons, especially my youngest who I coached with. I grew with the game as he grew. I had to do a certain amount of research on the book.
It is a book with a very deep setting in baseball, but it is also about so much more.
Yeah. I hope that people who are interested in baseball to great depth will still be interested in it, but I’m also cool with understanding that I’m not an expert. I’m exploring something not many people have explored: the nuances of ambidexterity, and switch-pitching. There are only maybe five, seven players who’ve been switch-pitchers. Only one current player in the minors is at a level where he’s working both sides.
It seems like baseball is about camaraderie and community, but it also involves an element of control: reading and manipulating people, or your own world. What does baseball mean to you?
I just think it’s a beautiful sport. My favorite time of the baseball game is before the game starts, just looking at that empty field, and at the people practicing out there. There’s just a great beauty to the game. My interest in the notion of a switch-pitcher started when I was having a catch with my son and my cousin. We were on spring break in Florida, and my son—I don’t know if he had a left-handed mitt on, or if he was just pretending with the right handed mitt stuffed on his other hand. In any case, he was throwing lefty, and he was throwing pretty good. There are some people who throw with their strong hand and they don’t look that good. And I just thought of this notion of someone who is completely ambidextrous. I don’t know if there’s a sport that would be a better vehicle to address someone’s perfect ambidexterity than baseball. In football there’ve been a couple quarterbacks who could throw a pass with their left if they were a righty, but it’s not something they did all the time. There’ve been switch-hitters in baseball throughout baseball history, so it’s not that remarkable. But switch-pitching—there just aren’t that many. You have to be amazing to be able to pitch with one arm, let alone two. So baseball was a vehicle to get at that.
Much of it had to do with this idea of gene manipulation, too, this idea of someone being so focused on perfect bi-modality that he would affect a change in his genes; that there would be this cross-lateralization of the hemispheres of the brain. Maybe an intense campaign of symmetry would affect, would change the genes in some way and manipulate them. And so there is this idea of the father manipulating his son. Shaping him is a better term, for me.
I agree, it’s not an evil manipulation. The father in the novel feels like, This is a right-handed world. And what more opportunities would his son have if he was completely ambidextrous.
Exactly. I guess— I love, I actually love the term manipulation. But there’s such a negative connotation that I think it doesn’t deserve. We write to manipulate. That’s exactly what I’m doing as an artist, and that’s exactly what filmmakers are doing and that’s why I go to see films, to be manipulated.
Even so much of conversation in real life is manipulation. Someone says, “Hey I think I’m fat.” They want you to say, “No, you’re not fat.” (Laughing) It’s not evil that they do that. Manipulation can be just a way of…expressing thoughts or theories and trying to get feedback out of it.
Right. That’s what I want to do. I don’t want to be evil in that approach, but I want people to be changed in some way.
Maybe the organization of words and thoughts and artful talking and writing is the only way you can make someone else think and feel exactly what you think and feel.
That’s what a huge part of writing is for me. I suppose I noticed it first at the Green Mill doing performance poetry. My attempt was to get someone to understand exactly how I felt. Well, my first point, really, was to just put precise language to the thing that I felt. Then when I recognized people were receiving it, they were being moved in the same way that I was moved by the experience, then I felt something happening. I made them to feel how I felt. By just using words. By putting words to it.
Maybe in our own way, we’ve started to give manipulation a good name. Manipulation: it’s not so bad.
Not so bad.
It’s not such a bad thing.
“I manipulated you.”
Yeah, exactly. “Hey, thank you.” (laughs) When did you first realize you had to write?
I’ve heard so many times people say, “I write because I have to.” I don’t know if I feel that I write because I have to. But I will say this: when I’m not writing, I’m very aware that I’m not writing. Even as nice as it is to get published here and there, and to do readings and that sort of thing, there’s still nothing like how good you feel when you have written something or you’re in the process of writing something. So I’m not quite prepared to say that I have to write; I’m just much happier when I am writing.
So when did you feel like you were getting this writing thing right, to feel good about it?
(boyish chuckle) I think I’m just starting go feel good about it. I mean, I really love my first book. But the copy that I do readings from is marked up. Terrifically. There are so many changes in it because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I knew some things about writing, but I didn’t know much about craft. I wrote a couple of things when I was younger and I thought, “Oh god, this is great,” and of course it wasn’t. But it felt like I said exactly what I wanted to say. So I had the experience regardless of its literary value. I felt after having written these things that I had done something, that it was good, that it was exactly what I wanted to say then. It was very important to my self-esteem, my own understanding of myself as a person who could create. And then I just was at the Green Mill doing performance poetry, and I had the experience of affecting people in this place where people went to drink and smoke and talk and that kind of thing. And all of a sudden, it’s totally quiet and—it was with my first attempts at performance poetry that I started to think I had some capacity to write. Even before I had any idea of craft, I still knew something was happening. I think a lot of it had to do with the sound. I knew how to write a sentence that sounds good—that was all that I had at first. Plus I think a kind of awareness of…humans, you know, the human heart. Teaching has informed my writing; reading has informed my writing; and my writing has informed my writing in some ways. So I just feel now like I’m starting to know what I’m talking about.
The Man With Two Arms is so different from How to Hold a Woman. It’s interesting to look at the two together: different ways of telling a story, the novel (The Man With Two Arms) and the novel-in-stories (How to Hold a Woman).
Yeah, The Man with Two Arms was a beast. I don’t know if I want to do that again. (laughs) The Man with Two Arms was the first thing I ever really needed an outline for. It was a difficult revision every time I sat down to revise it. How to Hold a Woman was tough, too, because it had to be tighter than my first book. But still, they were all self-contained stories, clips, shorter pieces. They had to be so unified and harmonious in a short space. And How to Hold a Woman was written in maybe the last three, three and a half years. I started The Man With Two Arms in March of ‘03, almost eight years—or seven—I don’t know what the hell it is, seven or eight years ago. When I stared it, I just didn’t know much about craft. I’d written two hundred pages before I almost trashed them all and started over. Revising it, I’d read earlier passages and think, “You poor bastard, you didn’t know what you were doing.” How to Hold a Woman was the past three years, while I was studying craft, figuring things out, knew more about what I was doing. Because The Man With Two Arms was over such a long period, I was revising, working with this younger self. There are some really good pieces that hang on from those early years, some others I had to work a lot because I wanted to keep part of, but had to approach it in a different way.
You had to meld it with all these other yous. There were like ten Billys writing this book over eight years; a team of Billys writing this.
And then three other books coming out while I was writing that book. So I would put it down for six months and then pick it up again.
You write in a lot of forms. It’s interesting to see that. Did you go into this saying, “I want to write a novel”? Or at some point did it simply become a novel?
I thought I was just going to write a story. Then right away it got really big. I had hundreds of pages and didn’t even get to the kid yet. Meanwhile, I was writing short stories for Logic of a Rose and How to Hold a Woman, so I was satisfying my short story Jones, and still writing a little poetry here and there. I think this is going to be the longest thing I write. But I guess these things just sort of suggest to you what they are, so I can’t say something’s not going to turn into a novel. I just hope whatever I pick up wants to be something smaller.
(laughter; we laugh)
So, revising How to Hold a Woman—at least you had these little sections you could focus on, one at a time. With The Man With Two Arms, how would you decide which page, which section, needs something?
It was messy. I sort of went about it from start to finish, but yeah, I don’t even know how to talk about it. It was just really difficult. When I’m working on some kind of writing, I don’t listen to the radio in the car. If I go to the gym, I don’t listen to the music. I’m constantly thinking: “What is necessary for me to accomplish in this scene?” “What do I have to do here?” “What has to happen?” “What’s the point of this scene?” I have to approach it the only way I know how, just a little piece at a time. I had a couple smart people helping me, too. I took a novel writing workshop with Fred Schafer at Northwestern. He helped with some of the larger issues. At one point he told me that as Henry hands Danny [the father and son in Two Arms, respectively] his life back, and lets him live it the way he wants, he sort of hands the narrative over to him as well. And that’s what we do as fathers: we hand our lives over to our sons and our daughters, and then you’re sort of on your own.
How does your experience of a being father fit into this?
I guess that was part of the evolution of what this book became. I felt very connected to the father who was shaping him through this. We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing. Sometimes I feel like I’m father of the year, other times I’m like, “How do you do that?” You know, to your kid, how do you say that? How do you think that about your own kid? I felt connected to the father, and I was really worried. A couple people looked at this and said, “Whose book is this? Is this Henry’s book, or is this Danny’s book?” And it’s both of them, you know what I mean?
Definitely. I mean, I only have the experience of being a child at this point, but that’s what touched me about the book, this interchange of energy and hopes and aspirations and how they get passed on.
Right. How we shape each other was a huge part of it. My sons are being raised by two parents. We both bring something to the offering. My wife is a musician, and she is much more connected to their lives in some ways than I am. And I’m connected in these other ways. There’s a lot of overlap in there.
This book is so much about relationships. When it comes to things that are close to you, or part of you, that you’re still trying to figure out, you have to write about these relationships you’ve struggled with, are still struggling with, these things that are the hardest stuff in the world sometimes. How do you deal with writing about these things?
It’s not easy. We’re muddling through. (Billy pauses, folds his hands, and stares out the lounge’s floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook Old Town Chicago, the setting sun drenching everything in a dark pink hue) We’re muddling through this life. Nobody has anything under control. (He looks at me, a new luster in his eyes) They seem like they do, I suppose, but when you get to know people, we all have our issues. We have to deal with other people. And sometimes, it’s just difficult. We don’t understand where each other’s coming from. We keep our secrets from each other. We snap at people and there are fifty million things beneath the snapping that our partners don’t know about. We are haunted by things from our childhood, things that our parents don’t even think about. We brush off things that they’re haunted by. I mean, there’s just so much that we don’t know about the people we’re dealing with. In speech, we rarely say what we really mean. That’s why it’s so important to me to be able to write precisely. But we as writers have revision to do. We don’t have revision in our communication with other people, so we remember things our wives and our girlfriends and our brothers and our sisters say to us that we can’t forget. We apply a value to them that they really don’t mean sometimes. So that’s a huge part of our troubles with each other. And yet, and yet, we still muddle through; we still make it all right, we still love and we forgive and all that stuff.
You have to be careful. There are things that I want to write about because it’s the only life that I know, but I am very close to betraying people at the same time. But this is all I have. This is my life; it’s all that I have to write about. All that I know. I can take some of that information, some of that history, and assume, imagine how other people would feel. Like in How to Hold a Woman, I don’t know the kind of grief that Audrey and Alan know. But I have enough smaller heartbreaks, enough sadness to understand how I would feel if something like that happened. That’s what I have. I’m not at a point in my own writing, in my understanding of the human psyche, that I could disregard my own back story when I write. Yet it’s still fiction. It’s fictionalized. It’s changed. I have taken my own heartbreak and shaped it into grief. It’s tough. My first creative writing teacher said you can’t have any loyalty. I don’t agree with that. You still have to have some loyalties, but I sort of understand her point, also: you have to be willing to go in that direction. You know what I mean? What am I going to write? I just can’t write from someone else’s heart yet. I’m just not that good.
I’m haunted by things, and I want to write about them. My dad is a great, loving guy, but some things that I write I don’t want him to see. If I had had a different father I would have written these things differently. He will see parts of himself in there. The danger is that those people close to me will put too much weight in, too much value in it. That’s just a little piece that’s blown up, fictionalized. It’s not an exact rendering. What I hope people who recognize themselves in my writing will see is the hope in the end of it: that there’s hope there. It turns out all right.
The other thing is, there’s stuff that never happened in here, and I still put myself into that. So someone could read something and be, “Oh god, that has to be true, how that happened.” And it’s not at all. And I still want them to be moved in a way, and manipulated in a way they feel that it happened. But it’s always going to be the danger with some people.
It’s a complex thing.
(profound silence)
So, if you had not found writing, if in some other universe—if you hadn’t found the Green Mill—what do you think you’d be doing?
You know, I’ve thought about this. Because I had a couple of experiences. One was as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old. I wrote this poem for this girl that I just felt like, “Man, this is the shit.” I had thought of myself as a writer, even though I didn’t have much empirical data to back that up. Then I just went to the Green Mill, never thinking I’d just start writing, but when I was there, there were some good poets, good performers who were just doing some great writing. I mean Cin Salach, Patricia Smith, Lisa Buscani, David Kodeski, Tony Fitzpatrick, Dean Hacker. I was like, I can do this. I didn’t know it was poetry then. It was highly narrative. After doing it for a while—really, after I wrote The Logic of a Rose—the Billy Lombardo that was being received by the world—that knew of that book at least, and there aren’t many people who do—the Billy Lombardo that was being received by the world was the Billy Lombardo that I felt like I was all along. I was being received in the way I...expected. That’s what I wanted. And I realized it had something to do with me putting my words to my life. It wasn’t someone else doing it, it wasn’t someone else who was just like, “Oh that’s the fucking punk who smoked dope everyday for the first three years of high school;” or “That’s the racist from Bridgeport;” or “That’s just a little bastard, a little fucking punk;” “The kid who got a seventeen on the ACT.” It had become this other thing; I put words to my life.
When you put words to your life, and they’re the exact words you wanted to put to it, and people receive it the same way, that’s what we have to do. We have to put words to our own lives, no matter what our art form is, or we have some other way of putting our self out there in a way that’s like, “This is the way I want to be received.” Finally, there was a convergence of those things. It wasn’t me thinking I was this person, and the world seeing this punk who got a seventeen on the ACT. It was like, all right, all these things were necessary for The Logic of a Rose to be The Logic of a Rose. All these things were necessary in my life in order for How to Hold a Woman to come into being. All these things were necessary for The Man With Two Arms to be a book. And I would be fucked if I didn’t have these things. I would hope that I would have figured out some other way to do it, but I can’t imagine that I would be happy. Something would be missing if I didn’t have this evidence of my life. You know what I mean? It made sense of the things that seemed stupid to me. I would’ve never told anybody what I got on the ACT before then. I never would have told someone about mistakes and regrets, and the heartaches and the terrible things that I did, but I don’t mind doing that now because they’re all necessary for these other things to happen.
That seems to be the spirit of Polyphony: encouragement for young people, an outlet for needed expression. When did this make sense to you that you had to do this, and what’s it become to you?
A kid came to me with the idea of it in 2004. She wanted to create a literary magazine at just the school for fiction, so I said let’s make it national; let’s see what we can do. It was just sort of a big idea. Like all my starts, it was kind of an accident, but it turned out to be exactly what it needed to be. My first book came out in 2005, and the first issue of Poly came out the same time. We were doing the same thing. It was allowing other people to put words to their own lives. A couple big things that came of it that I didn’t expect is, it’s even for the kids who are rejected—they’re getting responses from peers around the country, responses that validate their writing. Even if a kid phoned it in for an assignment, they’re still getting a response, are recognized as human beings with things to say. We’re trying to help them say it with greater clarity and precision and heart. The other thing I didn’t expect is how much of an impact it would have on the editors’ own lives and their writing. A lot of our editors are getting published, and it’s all being blindly juried. But they’re understanding; they’re reading, putting words to successes and failures, telling other kids, “Here’s what I received; this is what I think when I read your piece.” Their articulation helps their own writing. They’re affected by being editors. I heard back from a kid yesterday who’s like, “Man, that’s the best news. I been walking around with a smile on my face all day because I got accepted.” There’s not a minute I spend on that magazine that I don’t like spending. It’s not like that for teaching. (laughs) Being in the classroom is great, but there’s so much shit involved that I’m not in love with.
There’s a great scene in The Man With Two Arms where Henry, the father, whispers into this joker’s ear in his class, “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but I’ll tell you exactly who you are.” I was wondering if that’s a fantasy or if it’s based on reality.
Actually, my novella is about that, about a girl who whispers. She’s an idiot whisperer. She just whispers the perfect thing to people and it fixes them. I did that once to a kid and it was remarkable the effect it had on him. (laughs) I only pull it out once every ten or twelve years. I do it sparingly. The whole time the kid is thinking, “I don’t want to be whispered to…again…by an adult…in my whole life. If I’m never whispered to again like this, I’ll be happy.” (laughs) And a minute after that, the kids say, “Hi, Mr. Lombardo, how ya doing Mr. Lombardo!” Unbelievable respect.
That’s the thing! Every once in a while everybody needs just something whispered to them, very commandingly.
(laughter)
So, are you right-landed or left-handed?
I’m right-handed.
Last thing. With manipulation, or forming: with children as an extension of yourself, a book as an extension of yourself, what are some of your hopes for this book when it grows up? I mean, it’s already eight years old, really.
When I got the advanced copy for How to Hold a Woman, I cried, man. I was walking to my car at the zoo, and I was holding it in my hands, and you just can’t believe it’s out there, you know. Especially this one, after seven, eight years of working on it. So just having it out there in the world is great. I want it to be of interest to men and to women; I want people to read it, to pick up my other books. I feel like this [The Man With Two Arms] is sort of the big brother that can help out the little sister [How to Hold a Woman]. So much of it I’m already totally happy with. I just want it to be in bookstores. My other books aren’t in many bookstores. They’re on amazon.com. I want it to be out there and people to read it, you know.
Brandon Will is a former puppeteer (at a Detroit store-front theater) and moviemaker (of a ridiculously ambitious feature, Dadbot: The Movie). He currently works at a wonderful little independent bookstore and pursues a split-major in fiction writing and screenwriting at Columbia College Chicago, while he writes things. In the future he hopes to be a better man. His work was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Author photo by Stacy Anderson
